Many veterans can struggle to find closure after coming home, and some suffer physical and mental effects of combat long after they’re back to safety. Some never received a proper welcome home or recognition for their sacrifices.
But the organization Last Frontier Honors Flight wants to change that. The nonprofit celebrates Alaska veterans by providing a free trip to Washington, D.C. to sightsee and to bond with other veterans for several days in the nation’s capital.
This year, 21 Alaska veterans made the trip. 79-year-old Chester Ballot was one of them.
“It was just fantastic. Just made you proud. Made me proud,” Ballot said, calling the trip “the VIP treatment.”
When Ballot stepped off the airplane in Kotzebue late last month he didn’t expect the welcome. A crowd of people waved signs saying,“Welcome Home” and “Thank You for your service” outside the airport.
“It was the best homecoming I’ve ever gotten,” Ballot said. “There were other veterans, citizens and state troopers there, and my grandchildren. It was just fantastic.”
Ballot’s homecoming was quite different than when he returned from Vietnam five decades ago.
Ballot enlisted in the Army’s Signal Corps at 21, specializing in communications. After a brief time stationed in Germany, he left for Vietnam. His job was mostly providing telephone and telecommunications between two points.
“We hooked up to a radio that went 15 to 20 miles straight-shot, he said. “We would test our equipment and branch out telephone/telegraph to the different sites around us.”
Ballot said although he personally never attacked the enemy, he was still close to combat.
“The VC and the North Vietnamese always fired mortar shells at our camp trying to hit my tower,” Ballot said. “So every time I heard the ‘whomp-whomp’, or the siren go off, I’d run to the shelter — a sandbag shelter — and just wait until the siren stopped to be all clear.”
Ballot said he was shell-shocked when he returned from war and struggled to readjust to civilian life. Sometimes he’d get triggered by sounds even though he was back home.
“It was about midnight,” he said, recalling. “I heard ‘Pow pow pow,’ like over in Vietnam. I rolled over my bed and tried to crawl under it, which is what we’d do when we were over there.”
Ballot said that for a while he used alcohol to cope. He was upset because he didn't have an outlet to talk about what happened during the war. One of the things that helped him process his experiences was talking with other veterans and hearing familiar music.
“I got over it by listening to my parents’ church music,” Ballot said. “I listened to the drumbeat and the Eskimo dancing. I would always hear the drum beat. And it would just ease my mind back.”
Ballot has been home for about 50 years now and worked at a variety of jobs like at remote radio stations, including working for KOTZ, working for a local nonprofit organization and at a wildlife refuge.
About a decade ago, he was awarded the Governor’s Veterans Advocacy Award. In 2016, he was appointed to the Governor’s Tribal Advocacy Council. Now retired, he works to help other rural Alaskan veterans.
